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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29810151">The poetry of fish</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Johnny_Roundy/pseuds/Johnny_Roundy'>Johnny_Roundy</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Supernatural</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Established Castiel/Dean Winchester, M/M, dean is barely in it this is all cas, evolbionatural, philosophical ponderings about evolution and biodiversity, post-defeating chuck but the finale never happened</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 07:55:24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,922</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29810151</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Johnny_Roundy/pseuds/Johnny_Roundy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>While investigating a case on a college campus, Cas finds himself with the opportunity to attend an Evolutionary Biology lecture, and he decides to take it. Sitting there, he starts to think about evolution, how he watched life appear and become everything it is now, how God and the other angels felt about it, and how it took living among humans to understand what it all meant.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Castiel &amp; Dean Winchester, Castiel/Dean Winchester</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The poetry of fish</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This started out with me as an atheist biologist trying to figure out how evolution works in a universe with Chuck as God, and from there on it became a sort of character study of Cas, very much based on The Man Who Would Be King. My humble contribution to the wonderful niche of evolbionatural.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>"Didn't he go this way?", Dean asks as he and Cas walk into a university campus. Unfortunately for him, Cas isn't paying much attention to the hunt, and is instead more focused on everything around him, the signs on the walls, the big doors and the whiteboards he can see on the other side of them. He's never been in a university before.</p><p> </p><p>"I'm sorry, I didn't see."</p><p> </p><p>"Great. Guess we have to wander around here for a while, see if we see anything." But Cas isn't listening. Dean keeps talking but eventually trails off because Cas is busy noticing the class schedules, and he's particularly interested in one lecture.</p><p> </p><p>"Evolutionary biology", he says out loud.</p><p> </p><p>"....Okay." Dean answers, not thinking of anything else to say. "Should we split up? Me with the EMF reader and you with the...angel spidey senses?" Dean knows Cas doesn't understand that, but he still nods so Dean continues. "Alright, I go that way, you go this way, let me know if you see anything, and we'll meet back here in an hour. Sounds good?"</p><p> </p><p>"Yes."</p><p> </p><p>"Okay, see you then", and Dean walks away with the EMF reader. Cas, however, was barely even listening, and starts wandering closer to the students waiting for the lecture to start. Castiel, angel of the Lord, attending a biology lecture.</p><p> </p><p>He decides to attend it for two reasons, a fascination with evolution and a separate but connected fascination with the way humans perceive it. He used to believe "the human perspective is limited", as he told God once, though he's not sure He was even listening, but he doesn't think that anymore. Angels always liked to think they saw the universe wider than humans, they'd watch from above as humans invented telescopes and imagined panes of stars beyond the sky and laugh in their certainty that humans would never be able to reach an angel's sight. It's simply not how God created them, they'd think. But the moment Castiel, angel among angels, touched Dean Winchester's soul, he was immediately blown away by the depths it reached, the intensity with which it felt, the breadth of the worlds contained within a simple human soul, bigger than anything he'd ever felt. Did God create that? Was it so they could see Him? Or did humans create it themselves?</p><p> </p><p>The students start to walk into the classroom and he follows them, sits down in the last row of chairs, and listens attentively to the murmur. Some chatting about an assignment on forest conservation, others complaining about having to memorize words in Greek for a test on crustaceans, some a few rows ahead ranting about determination of sex in crocodile eggs during the Ice Age, and Castiel leans back in his chair, smiling fondly. In the span of the evolution of life as a whole, humans have only been on Earth for a second, but they want so much to understand all life around them. The ones that don't want to destroy it, at least, and that thought makes Castiel a bit sadder. But listening to the murmur in this room it's clear that when humans love life, they love it differently from angels, in a way angels never could: they ask questions.</p><p> </p><p>The professor walks in, takes a while to turn on the computer and start projecting a presentation, and then begins talking about the basic principles of evolution and natural selection, what is known about it, what isn't, when things were discovered. One thing Castiel knew but not many others did, even other angels, was that God resented evolution, a fact He always hid as intensely as possible because it was a secret that could unravel the angels' devotion to Him entirely, and this was due to a very simple fact: it's the only instance in the universe where He wasn't the puppeteer. Castiel remembers what Earth was like before life existed, when it was all what humans call "the primordial soup". Castiel thinks that name is very endearing, finds himself smiling fondly whenever this professor says it. To him there's something very intensely human about picturing that mix of chemicals and energies that were still in the process of becoming what humans would recognize as anything at all, something that wasn't quite anything yet but would be the basis for everything, and calling it something as trivial as a soup, like the soup they remember eating as children, because to them it wasn't trivial at all. Humans see a simple food that was their childhood sustenance as a holotype for the basis of all life, and some angels saw that as egocentric but Castiel couldn't. It's humans, scientists looking at things objectively, picturing that first spark of life and holding its hand like a child, pointing at the shapeless sea it sprouted from, unrecognizable to them, and saying "this was your soup. Your childhood was like mine. We come from the same and therefore we are the same. You come from a world I will never fully understand but you are my childhood and I am here because of you." Castiel remembers that first spark, God's hand reaching into the vast emptiness of that shapeless sea, illuminated with a sort of undecided light from a sky still having its light fixtures installed, and suddenly every angel had the visceral feeling that everything had changed. It was just a tiny little cell, something almost too small for an angel to comprehend, but it was so important that just by existing it grabbed every angel at the same time and forced them to comprehend it. "Bend down, you giant, and see this dot that I am, because I am more powerful than you", it seemed to say. A lot of angels felt insulted by that, but Castiel was transfixed. He had never seen a dot before, and what a wonderful dot this was, one that demanded to be seen by giants without even being aware of them.</p><p> </p><p>That dot had a long journey ahead, crossing paths with other dots, joining forces with them. When Castiel saw the first time one dot devoured the other he couldn't decide if it was gruesome or beautiful. This was the first time he felt doubt, but he would only realize that much later. After some time the strangest thing happened when one dot was devoured by another but continued living inside it, an act of apparent violence and destruction in fact bringing about creation of a new form of life. And this became so common that slightly bigger dots started appearing that were by themselves two different dots combined. Variety arose, the sea full of these minute wonders so many angels refused to see, and Castiel wondered what it was like to be alive with another being like those dots were. Like bees. Bees aren't soldiers, though humans sometimes call them that. Humans imagine them as monarchies with armies but they're not following orders. Castiel sees bees as sort of analogous to angels, the queen as the god of the hive, special for being the creator of all the others, but the other bees aren't taking orders from their god. They're telling each other where to find flowers, working together to build the hive, being good against all odds for something that can sting, complex against all expectations for something so small. They look like dots to most angels, too. As he relives those early memories, he wonders if he was coveting what those tiny dots had, if he was as jealous of the dots as the other angels were, albeit for different reasons. Could they be sinning if sins hadn't been created yet?</p><p> </p><p>Over time the dots started growing, becoming different things, bigger things, until they were what humans divide into Animals and Plants, but Castiel never saw them as that. The professor talks about the different lineages, green algae, red and brown algae, different phylla, and Castiel does remember that, how they sprouted from each other and formed new paths for their descendents to pave, separating further and further from other beings that were also their ancestors' progeny. But he never mentally divided them into so many groups, like humans do when they want to understand something. When humans want to understand something they pick it apart, divide it to its most irreducible form, both in theory and in practice. Taxonomy is a fascinating look into the human need to make the world less chaotic, and yet, the biggest question in biology remains "what is a species?". There's something very human about that too. Castiel just wanted to see what would happen next, what marvels would take place. Because they were marvels, as much as any of God's creations is. But therein lies the problem and the reason why God always resented evolution so much: this was the only thing in the universe he hadn't created. Yes, God was the puppetmaster. He was always there, pulling the strings, everything was His doing, from the Milankovich cycles of the Earth and the orbit of the moon that caused tides, to the wind that caused the currents that took each grain of sand from one end of the world to the other. But His doing ended there. He made it so that the water resisting the sunlight made the sea darker and darker as one went deeper into it, but He didn't decide deep sea life would adapt to that like it did. He decided how much oxygen would be in the air in the Late Carboniferous but even He was surprised when dragonflies grew as big as they did in response. And Castiel remembers that moment very clearly because that was the first time he saw the other side of the curtain, the crack in the statue. God looked frightened, and His first reaction was to hide so the angels couldn't see that. God was scared. Castiel had never seen God scared, so he started asking himself why. It's not suitable of angels to ask themselves why anything, so he guessed that was He hid, to avoid that. God is all-powerful and never fails, if he predicted that, he predicted everything, no? This was Castiel's second instance of doubt, but another one he would only be aware of much later. In this moment, what he realized was that God was scared because he was surprised, and God isn't supposed to be surprised. He had created life because what else could ever be the ultimate creation, what else but life could be His magnum opus, and He made it into His personal playground, but the problem with creating life is that it's alive, it exists beyond its creator, it squirms when you try to hold it down. He couldn't predict it, or rather He could predict every possible outcome but couldn't know which one would actually happen at any given moment, and He hated that uncertainty, that awareness of not being all-knowing. This realization only gave Castiel more questions. Why did he let life grow on its own then, only controlling the external factors? Maybe He wanted to be entertained, or He was curious. Why didn't He stop at this point and take the reins then? Was it too late? Was He still curious, against His best wishes? Could God not control His own will and thoughts? Could God even be curious?</p><p> </p><p>He remembers seeing the first fish to ever step on land, other angels perfectly still next to him, and his brother saying "don't step on that fish Castiel, big plans for that fish". They all felt a deep admiration for their Father as a creator and saw His creations as an extension of Himself, holy as He was holy. Some found it quaint how those creations seemed too small to be holy, but respected their Father's plans. They seemed convinced He was in control. Had none of them seen those dragonflies so mighty they surprised even Him?, Castiel wonders. But was it not logical that He was truly all-powerful if He could even create something that seemed more powerful than Himself? Castiel settled on this last one at the time, it was the only explanation that made sense to him. Something so mighty it surpasses God's intentions must certainly be holy, and if it is holy, it is of God just as much as he is, he thought. Sitting in this class, thinking of all this, he realizes things weren't exactly like that. He thinks God took the reins so recently and created humans so purposefully and in His image instead of letting evolution get to something similar to them on its own because He had plans for them that He had to be in control for, humans were too important a project for it to have the ability to surprise him. Little did He know. If only Castiel had lost his faith earlier, he would have seen the light much sooner. But maybe he would never have met Dean. What light would he have seen then?</p><p> </p><p>He suddenly snaps back to reality when the professor starts talking about the adaptations of deep sea life and there's a collective rumble from the class. "A collection of strange creatures", she calls it. Castiel has always been fascinated with the things humans call "strange". The professor mentions the different species in order of how deep the waters they wander in are, starting with Ctenophora, bioluminescent and similar to jellyfish. Humans consider these "strangely beautiful", and the strange thing about them is how beautiful they are when they can't even be seen. Castiel is very endeared by the question of what such a beautiful thing could be doing hidden in the dark, and he can't help but ask it too. It's a reasonable question, but it begs other questions: why are Ctenophora more beautiful than any other animal? What is beauty in nature? Is it what humans consider aesthetically pleasing? That has changed many times throughout the blip of the universe's history for which humans have existed, but some things are constant. Are those what beauty is? Why do humans find those things inherently beautiful? Maybe God put those ideals in their minds when He created them in His image. Does that mean those things are what God finds beautiful? That implies He has favorites among His creations, and that in turn creates even more questions: what about what Castiel finds beautiful? Don't angels get a say? Aren't angels alive? God created life when angels were there to see it, so maybe they don't count, maybe angels aren't alive at all. They don't get a say because they're not meant to have opinions or thoughts of their own, they're just meant to obey and do what God created them to do. Is Castiel not alive?, he wonders, sitting in this auditorium chair. He certainly is now, but was he always alive? What does it mean to be alive in his case? He did find Ctenophora particularly beautiful when he saw them appear in the depths, tiny specks of light murmuring in the abyss. To the question "why are they beautiful if no one is there to see them?", here's a possible answer: he was. Was he alive then? Why did he think they were beautiful? He figures it's because of what they represented: they were light not lit by God. Yes, He created the chemicals they used for bioluminescence, but He didn't order them to evolve the ability to produce them. Suddenly there was light. The professor says some of those chemicals are called luciferins and Castiel chuckles at that. God saw it as a rebellion too, but for him the most beautiful part was precisely that it wasn't. Evolution was never a concrete being with its own will and intent, it never did anything on purpose. Things simply happened, like they're still happening. God tried to corner it, force it to be predictable, but the beauty of evolution is precisely that anything can happen. The environment can cause mutations, and it determines which are favorable and which aren't, but it's all still unpredictable. Beautifully unpredictable, Castiel thinks, and settles in his chair at the thought of that. Maybe what made God resent evolution so much was precisely that it was a rebellion against Him that wasn't even on purpose, there was no rebel to direct His anger towards. He just had to sit there knowing he was not as powerful as He'd thought He was.</p><p> </p><p>This makes Castiel think of snakes. He had always admired snakes, but Lucifer was jealous of them. By the time Lucifer rebelled, snakes already existed. So did apple trees, and so many other species filling an entire garden of delights, an ironic name on God's part. Love of beauty and nature was always laced in irony, it came with the holiness. It felt right to Lucifer to appear as a snake, but he never forgave them because fact remains that by the time Lucifer rebelled, the mere existence of snakes had already beat him to it. The professor mentions that some things that don't make sense as adaptations can be the product of genetic drift, genes that tag along with others and stay there because they're not hindering anything. That one really made God angry, Castiel remembers that too. The more complex beings became, the more unpredictable God's little playground was until it wasn't his playground at all anymore, it had, well, a life of its own. The real first sin, maybe. Lucifer resented evolution too because it reminded him he wasn't the first one to do anything. He wanted to be a creator too but nature beat him to it. And to make matters worse, he'd gone through all that trouble out of hatred, and nature didn't have a motivation at all, it wasn't even doing it on purpose. I was simply existing. The devil himself had been outshadowed by nothing. Outloved and outhated. Oulived, in a way.</p><p> </p><p>The next group of species the professor mentions are the fish with near-detachable jaws. These are strange to humans because they're monstrous, breaking themselves apart to swallow creatures bigger than themselves whole. Monstrous for wanting too much and unhinging their very selves to get it, Castiel figures humans think, but no, they don't want too much, they simply have needs their environment does not meet. Small particles fall on them like snow in the darkness, but they can't possibly live on that. Swallowing fish whole is why they survive, it's no more violent than those dots devouring each other. And life does go on inside them, maybe not like in those dots but the fish these supposed monsters devour will later fall on other creatures like snow in the darkness that surrounds them, and the violence becomes life becomes violence again and again and the huge monstrous want of swallowing things alive was just the natural want to survive all along. One student two rows ahead of Castiel comments that these fish are ugly but thankfully there's no one around to see them anyways, and Castiel asks himself all those questions again. Is it the unhinged jaw that is ugly or is it the want? Is the want ugly because it's condemnable or because it's a mirror? Are his wants ugly too?</p><p> </p><p>Next is hydrothermal vents, gas that should be deadly but doesn't kill, fuming out of chimneys at the bottom of the ocean at temperatures that should by themselves be deadly too, and that aspect of "fatal in theory but booming with life in practice" is what makes these strange to humans. This makes Cas think about death, and the first time he ever witnessed it. The many first times he witnessed it, because death never stops feeling new to him. The death of the first cell wasn't the same as the death of the first cell that was a dot living inside another dot and neither of those were the same as the death of the first starfish or the first whale or the second whale or the hundredth. Each is different in its own way, like the universe stops breathing for a moment every time. The first time Castiel ever saw death he stood still for a moment, not knowing what to think (but being somewhat sure he wasn't supposed to think anything, or if he did, it was a thought brought upon him by his Father). God's hand lowered into the sea to pluck the life out of that individual dot, and thus He created the very first death. It was another moment where all angels suddenly felt that everything had changed, and sitting in this class, with all the knowledge of life he has now, he thinks it changed for the better. At first, a creation that consisted of destruction seems like a contradiction, but it's not destruction at all. Like the particles from the fish with unhingeable jaws, death for one being is never death for nature. Life becomes death and death becomes life, particles from one being are nurture for another and Castiel could spend millions of years following a single molecule, a single atom, go from algae to crab to fish to bigger fish to whale to necrophagous eel to crab again. Does that atom ever die? He doesn't think so. God can create anything but not even He can create the death of an atom. If he could, could that mean he could kill himself?, Castiel wonders. Is God made of atoms? Are atoms God?</p><p> </p><p>Another fascinating thing about death is that it is the engine that powers everything in life. The worst thing about death is that anything that's living can die. Seeing that tiny dot die made Castiel wonder if he could die too, and he had felt fear before but this was different. With a single move of His hand, God had also created the fear of death. Is the fact that angels can die proof that they're alive? Does that mean they only become alive when death was created? Does the fear of death make them alive? It was certainly death that made the world alive, kickstarting natural selection and the evolutionary processes that God resented so much. Maybe He resented himself for creating them, but death was unavoidable, even for Him who was all-powerful. Castiel wishes he'd been there to see the face of God as he created death. Was he sad? Was he proud? Would that pride be a sin? Did he regret it? There will never be an answer for these questions, He was alone. Was He alone on purpose? Castiel doesn't know. He thinks of all the living things that have died by his own hand, so many of them human beings, people, and looks around the room. He looks at the professor's presentation, all those species that are only alive because of the countless deaths that powered the evolutionary history that put them together piece by piece, and is still tweaking and reassembling them at every moment of creation where another beautiful creature is born, creation not by God's hand but by dot meets dot and in turn makes more dots until they become alive. Death is what makes life in evolution, and Castiel now knows it's the same in humans. That fear of death he felt millions of years ago is what powers humans through their lives. Even in His most precious project made to be puppeteered down the most minute detail, death still digs its claws and makes things bigger than God. Maybe death is His most rebellious creation, and how fitting that it outlived Him.</p><p> </p><p>The professor goes through a few other "strange beasts": the barreleye fish with its transparent head, chimaeras, tripod fish, but the one that makes Castiel pause and look around the room for reactions is the faceless fish. The class gasps in unison and he finds that another small moment that encapsulates what makes humans human. The strangest of all these strange monsters is to them a perfectly standard shaped fish that simply doesn't have a face. Humans have many impulses, some tied to morality, some universal, some unusual, some he figures created by God and others created by humans themselves, but one that is particularly interesting to Castiel is humans' impulse to look everything in the eyes. Before living among humans he thought it was all about the looking, a ritual they did as a way to affirm their presence, but now he knows it's about the eyes looking back at them. It's the impulse to want to be seen, and that is one of the things that distinguishes humans from other creatures. Some fish in the deep sea have abnormally enlarged eyes so they can notice possible predators or prey, it's a means of survival and nothing else. Crustaceans and insects have particularly sophisticated sight because it favors their survival too, and that's it. Human eyes aren't particularly interesting on their own, but the wants and needs they tie to them are fascinating. Humans can feel frightened when looking a praying mantis in the eyes, or a horse or a wolf, not because of the evolutionary adaptations in those eyes, but because they make the humans feel seen. They crave to be seen but they're afraid of it at the same time, they have specific rules for how much of each other they're supposed to see and when and how they're seen, they live their entire lives around how they're seen by others. Maybe it scares them to be seen by an animal because animals don't know those rules. But at the same time, they say they feel connected to horses because they have "human eyes". All humans need to feel a certain safety is to recognize something, and looking things in the eyes is how they connect to them, and therein lies the fear. Castiel understands that now, after all those times Dean demanded he looked at him, all those times he couldn't look at Dean. Blind humans see with their hands, even when they can't see with their eyes humans find a way. There's a power in seeing and being seen, and a visceral wrongness in living things that can't do either. A fish without a face has nothing to be recognized, nothing to be humanized, it can't be seen at all, and it can't see anything else either. It's a nothing that makes humans feel like nothing too, the most terrifying thing there is. Castiel wonders if God also made humans feel this in His image. Maybe the way in which the two are most similar is that God needs to be seen too. Is He even God at all if He's not being seen? What is He when nobody's looking? Why did He create death alone?</p><p> </p><p>Castiel thinks of all this and then thinks about himself, all these things he now understands because of humans, made more beautiful because of them, because of Dean, that answered questions he'd had for millions of years without even being aware of it. He wonders if other angels have these questions too, and realizes his experience with them tells him no, they don't. Why is he different? Was it the moment he saw God scared that changed him? Such a small thing, being at that place at that precise time. Was something different already in him before? For eons he thought everything he would later recognize as doubt was what God wanted him to think, everything he would later know as wanting was the wanting of God moving through him. But now he knows it wasn't so. He wonders what came first, the doubt or the disillusionment. Did God leave the angels because they were seeing the truth or did angels start seeing the truth because He'd left? Castiel wonders if this is what humans call the chicken and the egg. He thinks of how he found the Ctenophora beautiful when they first appeared, for the same reason God resented them, and how he fell in love with Dean the moment he held his soul for the same reasons God resented him too. Has Castiel always been in awe of defiance? Has that always been holy to him? Maybe he really did always have a crack in his chassis. But knowing he would have never fully realized it was there without Dean changes everything, and that wouldn't have happened if Dean hadn't died. God causes death, death turns the engine that defeats God, death outlives God. In Life and in their own lives too. Castiel looks at that for the first time and finds it beautiful in its own way.</p><p> </p><p>The bell rings and lecture is over. He walks out and wanders for a bit, watching the bees buzz from flower to flower in the garden, the birds flying above him, the grasshoppers jumping in the grass and people doing everything from ignoring them to trying to catch them to startling away from them. God is gone and life goes on. Suddenly Dean grabs him by the shoulders.</p><p> </p><p>"Cas! Where the hell were you??"</p><p> </p><p>"I was in that lecture. Did you find the-"</p><p> </p><p>"Yeah, I did thank you very much. It's done now." He breathes a sigh of relief and calms down. "Did you really go to a class?"</p><p> </p><p>"Yes."</p><p> </p><p>"Learn anything?", Dean chuckles.</p><p> </p><p>"Nothing you hadn't taught me already", Cas answers, and he kisses Dean before they start walking towards the Impala to go home.</p>
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